Recently, with an increasing demand for digital contents, a large amount of multimedia contents such as video, music, image and the like has been continuously created, distributed and served. Among them, images that are created or processed and edited by a user alone are particularly called UCC images. The use of such UCC images has been explosively increased, keeping abreast with the supply of portable digital cameras of high performance, the supply of large-capacity storage devices or portable storage media, and price drops thereof.
An UCC image searching technique issued to date generally requires to input text form-metadata of a desired image through a browser of a desk top PC or a portable terminal.
However, UCC images may lose their original features associated with a size, contents, a form or a quality of the images due to Internet or reproduction devices under different setups or through contents processing, re-edition, composition or the like conducted by users. In this case, although pre-input information such as metadata, identifier or the like for the original contents may have been known, it is impossible to search newly transformed contents because there is no additional metadata or ID information about them.